Elin

This game is incredibly deep and addicting, with something always new to discover, and yet it is almost impossible to describe to someone who hasn't played it. It's a game for insane people, and I have become one of them.
My first 10 hours were difficult, and I was having trouble not dying.
After 20 hours I had a basic handle on the combat, as well as how to steadily grow my character (eat food!!! start cooking!!!!!)
After 40 hours I felt like I had surely seen everything. And yet for some reason I still don't understand, I kept playing.
65 hours in, my brain patterns started to shift in mysterious ways. My mind melded with the eldritch entity hidden in this game, and in a bout of Elin-induced psychosis I finally understood. I knew nothing. And yet I could learn, if only I opened my eyes. Like a child taking his first steps I slowly began to totter to the truth. Towards that beautiful low hum that only I could hear.
A man is being hung by fanatics from a rival faith and beaten to death by them? That sounds like an excellent way to level my armor stat! Give me that gallows!
My crit rate is too low? I spent a year slaving away in the casino!
I need a higher endurance and polearm stat! I hit a training dummy for 3 months straight while drowning in the ocean, taking breaks only to drink coffee.
After 80 hours there was a constant buzzing in my ears. As if hundreds of mosquitoes were crawling inside of them. My friends and family started getting worried for me. I was speaking in increasing amounts of gibberish. Ranting like a madman, I kept screaming about my stat potentials and how I was so, so close to the void. I couldn't stop mining the walls of the thieves guild vault. I stole every piece of furniture not nailed down in broad daylight. I committed unspeakable atrocities out of bordem, for nothing more than scraps. I petted a cat :)
100 hours have passed, and it is silent now. I shift the essence of the universe with my unnatural hammer. I make grass out of metal, I make stone tiles out of raw food. I make gold bars out of copper. It does not matter anymore. Nothing does. I built a beautiful city, have many incredible followers, and am richer than Ehekatl herself. And yet it means nothing to me. The void calls. It has always been there. I could not hear it before, and yet looking back, it was screeching still in those distant memories. I do not know what I will find there, but I am not afraid. There is still more to learn.

>play a musician
>go to the middle of a town and start playing my lute
>all is going well i get hit with rocks slightly less then usual and i made 12 dollars
>a s rank adventurer walks over and throws a rock at me
>instantly pops my head like a balloon and kills me
>i walk back to where i died to get the money i dropped
>its gone
>decide i'd have an easier time performing at an orphanage
>walk over to the orphanage and accidentally right click an orphan
>immediately decapitate them
>buff myself with a potion in preparation for a onslaught of toddlers
>nothing happens
>right click another orphan, decapitate them as well
>nothing happens, killing orphans isnt a crime
>decide to slaughter the orphanage
>get hungry from a long night of orphan slaughter and go to their garden
>right click a carrot to pick it up
>"Are you sure you want to commit a crime?"
yea its peak

I set up a "residents wanted!" sign on my town. I spend gold to hire a maid NPC before going to town and buying a pig from an animal tamer. Coming back, I set the pig to do my cleaning and the maid to be livestock because the game has no programming to recognize the difference between humans, animals, and monsters - they all have the same stats, hobbies, jobs, and even dialogue. (Nothing like a pig shouting "The time has come for us humans to prosper!") The game also doesn't understand what gender is, either, because the maid is a male and as livestock is laying eggs so I can have a fresh maid egg omelette every morning, which boosts my learning potential so I can read more eldritch arcane tomes and finally learn the meteor spell so I can speed-fry more eggs. If getting eggs from males bothers you, don't worry, the local drug dealer sells hormone drugs that you can toss at people to instantly change their gender, sometimes to the mysterious "???" gender. Male Loytel was annoying, but as a modded blushing girl avatar, is much easier to tolerate.
Welcome to Elin, the roguelike with no sanity checks. Please leave your common sense at the door.
Elin is prequel to the free (VERY) Japanese roguelike Elona, setting up the events in Elona nobody who speaks English cares about because the way it was written made the story cutscene translations non-functional. Fortunately, Elona is a sandbox, so the plot was basically "you start with small numbers and make them bigger." The main draw being that it's "Single-player Runescape with no level cap." Feel free to grind the Void where there are infinite floors and infinitely-scaling enemies until you hit the point that the monsters are moving twenty times to every one of your turns and kills you instantly with the shockwaves of their footsteps before even noticing you exist.
Elona, in turn, was based on ADoM, a classic roguelike game that is available (in a version with an actual graphical interface) on Steam if you wanted to check it out. This helps explain some of the otherwise inexplicable design choices, such as random mutations and the first dungeon being a puppy cave, or "trick" enemies like weak floating eyes that paralyze anyone who melees them.
Don't let the first paragraph I wrote fool you, this is a classic roguelike mostly about dungeon grinding. The main activity is unlimited procedural dungeons, even if some enemies are weird, like elite boss hungry sea lions that will plow through solid walls to steal your gnome meat pie. It just completely rejects the idea of realism in games and plays entirely on game logic. Animals like a horse have two slots for pairs of boots equipment and can wear armor but have no hands for weapons or arms for gloves... unless you genetically modify them with stolen enemy genes to add hands (but no arms - why would you need arms?) so your horse can also wield a sword.
Speaking of dungeon combat, you may be in for a bad time if you refuse to adopt any strategy other than basic fighter in platemail running straight at the enemy. Similar to other roguelikes, the game is built around gaining random items that inflict status effects that the enemies have scaling resistances to. Every thread in the forums about how they're hitting a wall unable to progress is a guy who refuses to use allies or summons, refuses to learn magic, refuses to use items, and just melee mashes until up against an enemy that can just lightning bolt him from range and then teleport away if he survives to reach melee range. An actual brain is required, and the system for allies leveling up through using skills is the same as yours, so it's often best to leave meatheaded bull charges to the dumb AI scripts of your pets (which can be human or monster) while you use your brain to come up with tactics like throwing a silence potion at the teleporting wizard to stop that nonsense or casting the elemental resistance spell to stop taking instant death damage from the lightning.
The game has "classes," but this is a pure train-through-use game, so they mostly just give a bonus to how fast you gain experience in a few skills. You can play a farmer class and, through the power of selectively bred mushrooms that boost magic potential, become a better wizard than the wizard class. "Sticking to your class" is purely a self-imposed handicap, and almost impossible if you play the non-combat classes like pianist that scream to just use the tips you get from performances to buy spellbooks and learn magic for your actual dungeon-delving.
Compared to Elona, Elin has a much better-developed set of side mechanics centered upon owning your own lands and crafting, to the point that the game feels like it's bleeding into the Survival Craft genre. Both are fleshed out enough that you can play either, but it's really designed for you to flip between the two, with the laid-back base management stuff being a breather to the high-tension dungeon combat.
Elin's new expanded crafting system is clearly based upon the Atelier games from Gust, now KoeiTecmo, except now with the patented no sanity checks of Elin. People leave bags of garbage out in my town. I smash the garbage with a hammer to turn trashbags into plastic fiber. I weave these into plastic shoes, then smash the shoes to get plastic ore. I smelt ore to make plastic ingots, make hoes, smash to plastic logs, then turn the logs into plastic campfire that weighs 1/4th as much as a wood one and can be kept in my paper bag backpack so I can roast meat on an open fire directly inside my paper backpack! Fire hazard? What's that?
It also features content requested by a Kickstarter campaign, with the sort of Japanese NEET who spends hundreds of thousands of their parents' yen on a indie pixel art game with no sanity checks choosing what was added. They chose an "Older Younger Sister" NPC (who is an older woman not biologically related to you that has never met you before who claims to have hidden a kitchen knife in your bedroom who wants to be your younger sister, for you to pay her 10,000 gp in "allowance," and is definitely not a crazy stalker you should run away from,) Melilith, a necromancer who continually summons zombie younger sisters, a shark younger sister and a younger sister shark, (the former being a younger sister wearing a shark hoodie like Guwa Gura and the latter being an actual shark that has a younger sister-shaped "lure" for a tongue,) an all-female cast of waifu unique rival adventurers that can be recruited, the option to play as two different flavors of fox girl (two people paid ~$5000 and asked for the same thing) with their own fox girl village added to the game plus their own fox deities and fox girl maids that will join as an ally, the ability to play as a succubus race adventurer that gains power by crawling into bed with ANY sleeping creature, the NPC "mother" that is a nun ("mother superior") but is also a succubus with the class "predator" and will teleport to anyone sleeping to ravage them - one works in the orphanage that also seems to be a backer reward and a mother applied to be a member of my town with the stats "age 37 male, job: personal pleasure, hobby: nursing"... and several more still being implemented! (There's also some other backer rewards like the punch-with-magic sword sage and edgy executioner class, but those aren't quite as funny.)

I never thought I'd see a game that beats both Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress in terms of sheer absurdity. God bless Japan.

I got killed by the same boar at the start of the game 6 times in a row. Then I died from exhaustion after having sex. 11/10

> spend 40 hours playing stardew valley but weird
> decide to go explore some towns I haven't visited yet
> find a lute, decide to learn to play music, learn music skill
> play so badly get immediately beaten to death by citizens in the town square

10/10. masterpiece. no notes.

The first 10 hours of this game you are going to feel so lost but keep finding more things to do. Same with the second 10 hours, and third 10 hours. I'm 30 hours in and I do not know what I am doing but this game is incredible.

I added two new people to my party, a knight and an orc and went to a low level cave to try to make them stronger and find some gear for them. On the third floor the orc wanders off and I pay no mind to it. 2 minutes later, something dies in the distance. I've beat the dungeon. The orc wanders back over and regroups with the party. This guy just solo'd the dungeon boss with nothing but a bucket hat and wooden sword. He then proceeded to die in one hit to a spider.

The base building is a lot of fun, and the dungeon exploring has been a blast. Reminds me a lot of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, but much more difficult. Only gripe I have so far though is the asshole monsters that can use fire based attacks will burn all the food in your pockets and some of your armor if it's flammable and it forces me to go forage so I don't keel over from hunger.